On April 9, 1945, after conducting a prayer service for fellow prisoners in Flossenberg camp, Dietrich Bonhoeffer received a summons: "Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready and come with us". He replied, "This is the end, for me the beginning of life". He was hanged that night.The path to his death at 39 was prefigured in his early work on The Cost of Discipleship, where he wrote that the Cross "meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die".
This end was also prefigured in his early recognition of the idolatrous and evil designs of Hitler's Third Reich. He helped form the Confessing Church to resist Hitler's efforts to co-opt Christianity in favor of a national cult of "German Christianity". Bonhoeffer's 1932 radio address, alongside his direct involvement in Operation 7, directly resulted in his brother in law, Hans von Dohnanyi's, arrests, convictions and assassinations.
He had briefly accepted a safe haven in New York's Union Seminary. But in 1939 he returned to Germany: "I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the tribulations of this time with my people". He had learned the lessons of Black Harlem and its Christian community only too well.
He was arrested in 1943.
In prison he imagined a new perspective for the church -- not from the center of power and status, but from "below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled -- in short, from the perspective of those who suffer".
Bonhoeffer is the rare theologian whose biography is studied as carefully as his written work for clues about the challenge of faith in our time -- in particular, the ethical dilemmas of responsible action in the face of injustice and tyranny. Sadly, many draw the wrong conclusions about his life because they -- quite wrongly in my estimation -- tie Bonhoeffer to assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer joined the Abwehr in order not to be sent to the front lines -- not to kill. He stayed true to that conviction even all the way to his own gallows.
In that way, Bonhoeffer is the modern person's holy man: Not in the cloister, or in some safe "religious" zone, but in the midst of history, in discernment, in judging how God is calling us to respond to the needs of our suffering neighbors. A witness for our time.
He once had written:
There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God's commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.Would that we might follow in his steps today.